Category Archives: donations

As Wellington Scoop has reported, Community campaigning group Action Station has made a vital contribution to the campaign to save the Basin Reserve from a massive motorway flyover which the New Zealand Transport Agency wants to build there.

Despite a Government-appointed Board of Inquiry ruling in 2014 that a Basin Reserve flyover should not go ahead, the New Zealand Transport Agency took the matter to the High Court in July, attempting to overturn the Board’s decision.

NZTA is able to spend millions of dollars in taxpayer money to pursue its flyover obsession, which puts community groups such as the Save the Basin Campaign and the Mt Victoria Residents’ Association, which jointly opposed NZTA’s appeal in the High Court, at a huge financial disadvantage.

Save the Basin Campaign spokesperson Tim Jones said “We’re delighted that Action Station agreed to help with our fundraising. Their support allowed us to reach a new audience and provided a crucial boost to help us meet our fundraising target for our legal fund. Our supporters may not be able to spend up large with taxpayer money, as the Transport Agency does, but they make up for it with determination and commitment.”

For Action Station, Nina Atkinson said “ActionStation exists to make it easy for progressive New Zealanders to take action on the issues they care about. Hosting the crowdfunding campaign and asking our community to chip in for this people-powered effort was the very least we could do and we’re so glad it helped.”

Fundraising through Action Station raised close to $2000 for the legal fund. The cheque handover took place at Tuesday lunchtime at the northern entrance to the Basin Reserve, near where NZTA wants to impose the flyover monstrosity. The High Court hearing on NZTA’s appeal finished on 31 July, and the hudge’s verdict is now awaited.

What’s astonishing is that the Transport Agency’s obsession with building a flyover at the Basin Reserve, no matter the cost to the taxpayer, no matter how outdated, ugly and discredited urban flyovers are, is being conducted in the face of research the Transport Agency itself has carried out. It’s described in this report:

The Transport Agency is supposed to be building transport infrastructure to meet future demand – so why does it continues to build motorways, flyovers and the other expensive nostrums of mid-twentieth-century transport planning, instead of spending money on public transport infrastructure for which there is a large and growing unmet demand?

One reason is that a Generation X Government with strong ties to the trucking industry is still committed to its $12 billion Roads of National Significance boondoggle. Another is that the New Zealand Transport Agency was created out of two bodies: Land Transport New Zealand (the policy part) and Transit New Zealand (the road-building part).

Ever since then, Transit has been the large, well-funded tail wagging the small policy dog. Because what Transit knows how to do is build roads, lots of roads, big expensive roads – and by golly, they’re not about to let some pointy-headed policy wonks and their inconvenient research studies stop them.

It seems that, like an addict who knows he or she should stop but wants just one more hit, the Transport Agency is incapable of saving itself from its roadbuilding addiction. So we’re staging an intervention to save NZTA from itself – and save an iconic part of Wellington from NZTA. Donate to help us bring this tragic flyover addiction to an end.

The New Zealand Transport Agency’s appeal to the High Court of the Board of Inquiry decision to decline resource consent for a Basin Reserve flyover has been set down for Monday 20 July.

The hearing is expected to last two weeks.

NZTA will be claiming that the Board decision was wrong on various points of law. The Board itself will not be represented at the hearing. That means it’s up to groups like us to defend the Board’s decision.

Save the Basin Campaign Inc and Mt Victoria Residents Association have jointly taken on Matthew Palmer QC to act for them at the hearing.

We need to raise $50,000 to pay for this legal representation. We have raised a good chunk of this. We have four months to raise the rest.

Many of our supporters have already contributed generously, and that’s much appreciated. We’re happy to accept donations via https://savethebasin.org.nz/donate/ but we also need your help with the names of new people to approach.

Got a friend who’s opposed to a Basin Reserve flyover and wants to stop it going ahead? Let us know their name and contact details by emailing stoptheflyover@gmail.com, and we’ll approach them.

NZTA are using taxpayers’ money – your money – to continue to push for their unwanted, unnecessary, ugly and expensive flyover. By putting our heads and our funds together, we can and will stop them.

Rather than accepting the Board’s 500-page decision, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) chose to appeal it to the High Court. The NZTA has now finalised its grounds of appeal, but given the complexity of those grounds, the hearing is likely to be lengthy, meaning that it cannot be scheduled in the near future.

We currently expect that the appeal will be heard in the second half of 2015, but this is yet to be confirmed.

A flyover would dominate the view from St Mark’s School – With thanks to Wellington Scoop

The NZTA wriggled and struggled and fought, but eventually they had to bow to the will of Board on Inquiry Chair Judge Whiting and produce visual mockups of what a flyover would look like imposed on Mt Victoria and the Basin Reserve area.

Of course, being the NZTA, they prettified the images as much as they could, expecting us to believe that a flyover would come magically surrounded by fully-grown trees. But even so, the results aren’t pretty, as a new article on Welington Scoop clearly shows: http://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=62368

This article contrasts before and after views of Mt Victoria with and without the proposed flyover. It shows how the flyover will cut across Wellington both physically and visually, severing communities and destroying iconic views. And for what? For nothing more than a monument to NZTA”s and the Government’s outdated transport thinking in an era when vehicle use is declining.

Let’s work together to stop this grey monstrosity being foisted on Wellington. You can:

Whatever you call it, we need it. (At least, we need some of it – we don’t want to be unreasonable!)

That’s because we’re a community organisation pitted against a lavishly-funded Government agency that can afford to pay top dollar to secure the services of lawyers, consultants and expert witnesses.

We make up some of the gap through volunteer work done by already busy people – but we need money too. And if you want this nonsensical, retrograde, ugly flyover stopped, then we need your help. Incidentally, when we were in Stockholm – my buddy shattered his arm one night doing something silly, and we had to get a låna pengar direkt to get him fixed up.